The Different Installers

The different installers are located in your FOG server's web interface. The link is always at the very bottom of every page and are even available to you if you're not logged into the fog server.

FOGService.msi - Windows only, and is ideal for network deployment.

SmartInstaller.exe - This is the new default installer. It will work on all platforms.

Debugger.exe - This is not listed in the web interface but is available from github here. Only use this when the above two are not working. This build has more detailed logs that you can use for troubleshooting or a bug report.

Installing - Linux

xprintidle - This dependency is optional. If not installed AutoLogOut will not run. xprintidle basically just returns the idle time of an x window, therefore on a system without a GUI it is not needed and should not be installed. It should be available in standard package managers. E.G. apt-get, yum, or dnf

Installing Mono
Many distributions come with an out of date version of mono in their package manager. Therefore, do not attempt to install via your package manager without the below modifications

openSUSE and SLES

Other

The FOG Client can be installed on any platform that can run the latest stable build of mono.

To install:

Check your package manager for mono-complete. After installing it run mono --version. Ensure the version is at least 4.2._ . If it not, remove the package.

If your package manager had an old version of mono, see [1] for how to compile mono

Download SmartInstaller.exe from your FOG server and run the installer with mono.

sudo mono SmartInstaller.exe

The client will install to /opt/fog-service , and fog.log will be located at /opt/fog-service/fog.log

If your system either has systemd or initd the client will be automatically configured to run on startup. If your system does not have either, you will need to configure your system to run the manual start command below on startup.

To manually start and stop the service:

sudo /opt/fog-service/control.sh start

sudo /opt/fog-service/control.sh stop

Limitations

The FOG Tray is currently incompatible on all non-windows systems. Regardless of what you set during installation, it will not run.

SYSTEM level services need to be digitally signed otherwise windows will throw security errors. This can also be used to ensure no tampering was done with the client files

That certificate is used to “verify” upgrades. Lets say we release a patch for the client, the client will download the MSI from your server and check if it was signed by us. If the MSI was somehow tampered, the digital signature would no longer be valid.

Using HTTP over HTTPS has no security benefit to the client. Why? Because all traffic is already encrypted. Here’s a very basic overview of how the new client communicates

Each client has a security token. This is used to prove to the server that the client is the actual host and not an impersonator. This token gets cycled constantly. When the client first makes contact, it encrypts its token and a proposed AES 256 key using RSA 4096 using your server’s public key. This public key is verified against the pinned server CA certificate by checking the x509 chain and fingerprints.

If the server accepts the security token and the new AES key, all traffic from that point on is AES 256 encrypted using that securely transmitted key.

The whole point of our security model is to allow for secure communication over insecure medians.
Even then, the client installation has an HTTPS option, but it serves no real security benefit.

Maintain Control of hosts when building new server

Because of the security model of FOG 1.3.0 and the new client, without the proper CA and ssl certificates present on a new fog server, any currently deployed hosts with the new fog client installed will ignore the new server and not accept commands from it. This is by design.

In order to maintain control of existing hosts with existing new fog client deployments, you must copy this directory from the old server to the new server:

/opt/fog/snapins/ssl

Copy the directory to a temporary location first. I would suggest /root/

cp -R /opt/fog/snapins/ssl /root

Then you can use scp to copy the directory (or some other method) to your new fog server:

scp -rp /opt/fog/snapins/ssl root@x.x.x.x:/root

Run this command from the old server, Where x.x.x.x is the new fog server's address.

Or, the reverse:

scp -rp root@x.x.x.x:/opt/fog/snapins/ssl /root

Run this command from the new server, where x.x.x.x is the old fog server's address.

Next, install fog. After the installation is complete, delete ssl folder the installer made, and place your old ssl (from /root that you copied) in there. The ownership should be fog:apache on redhat variants, should be fog:www-data on ubuntu. Then re-run the installer.

If you do not care about maintaining control of existing hosts with existing new fog client deployments (because there is only 1 or 2), you can recreate your CA with the -C argument during installation:

./installfog.sh -C

Note: Recreating the CA (--recreate-CA) is very strongly advised against if you have many clients deployed already, because it resets the identity of the FOG Server. This causes all fog clients to distrust the server, and will require total reinstallation of all fog clients in an environment. However, you may recreate the keys (--recreate-keys) safely.